Vice President Kamala Harris, the former San Francisco district attorney, arrived at her old stomping grounds on Wednesday to raise money for the Biden-Harris reelection campaign and was greeted by more than a hundred pro-Palestinian protesters.
Her appearance in the Bay Area comes a day before former President Trump is scheduled to attend a fundraising dinner in San Francisco, just a week after he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying records in a scheme to conceal hush money payments to a porn actor. .
Read more: Trump plans to raise money in California in the wake of his felony conviction
Harris arrived in San Francisco after an earlier fundraiser at a private home in the Oakland Hills.
Pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the venue where Harris was scheduled to speak, chanting, “Shame on you!” and “Cease fire!” as attendees walked inside. Police asked protesters to move a block away from the location and threatened arrests. They quickly set up barricades between demonstrators and police. The activists’ shouts grew louder as the vice president’s motorcade approached.
At an intimate live music venue in San Francisco’s Mission district, Harris addressed a room full of about a hundred supporters, including some she said she recognized from her years in Bay Area politics.
“We’ve all been involved in these four-year cycles together many times,” Harris said. “We talked almost every time about ‘this is it.’ Well, this year everything is at stake in this election.”
Read more: The first female vice president is from California. Could she help elect the state’s first female governor?
The meeting was organized by Democratic donors Shannon Hunt-Scott, Stacy Mason and Sheila Thompson and small business owner Manny Yekutiel, who runs a local venue that holds civic events.
For a portion of the event that reporters were allowed to attend, Harris made no mention of Trump’s criminal conviction or President Biden’s executive order banning asylum seekers from crossing the southern border.
During her 13-minute remarks, Harris addressed the loss of abortion rights in states across the country and reiterated her call for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas.
“What we have seen in Gaza is far too many innocent civilians being killed,” she said. “Humanitarian aid is refused in many cases. The president and I have been very clear. This war must end, we need a ceasefire, we need the hostages, we need aid, and we must commit to a two-state solution.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
